Canadian-owned sculptures found not to be Michelangelo’s but expected to sell for tidy sum this month

A mysterious and controversial set of nine Renaissance sculptures, owned for decades by a Canadian family and now held by a Vancouver museum, will finally be sold this month at a major auction in New York — not as multimillion-dollar models made by Michelangelo, as the pieces were long thought to be, but as imitative artworks created during the Italian master’s lifetime by a notable Dutch follower.

It’s a reversal of fortune that deprives the municipally-funded Museum of Vancouver of what its CEO says could have been “an enormous windfall” in exhibition revenues had the pieces proven to be Michelangelo’s creations.

But the re-attribution also represents millions of dollars in forgone revenues for the Canadian government, which issued huge tax credits to donors when the 450-year-old sculptures — along with a second set of nine associated models — were acquired by the museum in 1997 and 2006 as possible works by one of history’s most renowned artists.

“This is a story about attribution and how sometimes attribution can change,” Museum of Vancouver chief executive Nancy Noble told Postmedia News. “I don’t think anyone’s to blame for the thought that they might have been from Michelangelo’s studio. I think there were legitimate reasons why earlier scholars may have thought that. But I think people need to understand it’s not a science — it’s an art to attribute things to different artists.”

The nine fired-clay objects to be auctioned this month — a stand-alone torso, limbs and other body parts, several of them matching elements from some of Michelango’s most famous sculptures — have now been attributed to one of his 16th-century contemporaries, the “Netherlandish” artist Johann Gregor van der Schardt, and valued at just $200,000 to $300,000 ahead of Sotheby’s Jan. 31 sale of important art by European masters.

The terracotta sculptures are still considered historically significant, described by Sotheby’s as “rare examples of study-models of Michelangelo’s work by a talented younger artist.”

Still, the planned auction of the collection represents a financially disappointing and anti-climactic ending to a long-running saga that saw the so-called bozzetti — models used in planning full-scale sculptures — taken across Canada in 1972 in a high-profile exhibition that showcased them as universal cultural treasures made by Michelangelo’s own hand.

In recent months, after a series of scholarly studies and scientific tests commissioned by the Vancouver museum, that tentative attribution of the models to Michelangelo was ruled out by international experts, who concluded that van der Schardt was the likely sculptor.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘definitive’ ever when it comes to attributing art – particularly Renaissance art,” said Noble. “They’ve been re-examined and, yes, now they’re being attributed to van der Schardt. They had been attributed in the past to Michelangelo… but that’s turned out not to be the case, based on modern scholarship.”

While much of the monetary value of the bozzetti was erased by the new attribution, the pieces continue to possess significant financial and cultural value as Renaissance artworks, according to both Noble and Sotheby’s curator of “old masters” artworks, Margaret Schwartz.

“Their indisputable association with famous works by Michelangelo has on occasion been the source of historical confusion; the unsustainable notion that these were in fact preparatory studies by Michelangelo himself has been proposed and disproven,” Schwartz states in Sotheby’s catalogue entry for the Vancouver bozzetti. “Recent scholarship on van der Schardt, a close follower of Michelangelo and an accomplished sculptor in his own right, has clarified their place in the history of sculpture and has given us a rare window into the methods of a student of the greatest Renaissance master. ”

During their 75 years in Canada, the sculptures have been the subject of a book, a lawsuit, a wrenching family feud and lingering doubts — now proven to be justified — about their true origins.

Yet there is no disputing their authenticity as original pieces from the famous collection of 16th-century German art connoisseur Paul von Praun. And that sterling provenance can be traced all the way to a Christie’s auction in 1938, when Montreal businessman Percival Wolfe acquired the objects amid tantalizing speculation that they’d been crafted by the Renaissance’s greatest sculptor, Michelangelo, the maker of David and other artistic masterpieces.

The disembodied bits of human anatomy purchased by Wolfe “enjoyed the attentions of ambitious scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries,” Schwartz observed. And while “six of the nine models offered here are recognizable as studies after anatomical elements seen in famous monuments sculpted by Michelangelo Buonarotti,” the models now credited to van der Schardt remain significant examples of how such artists “learned by copying their immediate predecessors and contemporaries, particularly the works of great masters.”

The nine models to be sold by Sotheby’s were once part of an 18-sculpture set bequeathed by Wolfe to his sons, Vancouver twins Paul and Peter LeBrooy. In the late 1980s, Paul brokered a $14-million agreement to sell the collection to an unidentified Vancouver businessman, but the deal collapsed amid legal wrangling over proposed authenticity tests.

“Paul devoted much of his life to ascertaining the true provenance of these models,” Peter LeBrooy told the Vancouver Sun in 2001. “We went through 10 years of legal trouble and by the time it was all over, my brother was bled dry. It was always another lawyer, another year in the undoing.”

The models eventually wound up at the centre of a bitter dispute between Paul and Peter themselves, prompting the collection to be evenly divided in the years prior to their deaths in 1999 and 2003 respectively.

The pieces that had belonged to Paul LeBrooy — whose 1972 book about the sculptures, Michelangelo Models Formerly in the Paul von Praun Collection, was published at the time of their Canada-wide tour — were purchased by a consortium of 66 B.C. art investors and donated to the Museum of Vancouver in 1997.

Although Noble won’t disclose details of the 1997 acquisition, the deal would have seen millions of dollars in federal tax credits granted to the donors through the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, a federal agency that supports the public acquisition and retention of important works of art.

“The museum used the value determined by two experts at the time of the application to (the federal review board) to certify the collection. That was and continues to be a requirement in all of these applications and was accepted by the (board),” said Noble. “All I am willing to say about the original valuation is that is was substantially more than the estimate Sotheby’s has put on the collection today due to the change in attribution.”

A similar deal was struck in 2006 when the museum acquired the other nine models that had been owned by Peter LeBrooy, reuniting the collection. But because 10 years haven’t yet elapsed since that acquisition, said Noble, the MOV would have incurred significant tax penalties under federal rules if it had tried to sell the entire 18-sculpture set at this month’s Sotheby’s sale.

She expects the remaining study-models to be sold when the 10-year, post-donation period ends in 2016.

“They are Renaissance objects, and that makes them significant, (but) they don’t have significance to our museum particularly,” said Noble, who recently oversaw a review that refocused the MOV’s mandate more sharply on Vancouver’s own cultural history.

“For us, obviously, if they were Michelangelo’s (models) it would be an enormous windfall. But that is the way it works. We’re resigned to that,” she said, noting that income generated by the auction will be re-invested in the museum’s holdings. “We’re hopeful they’ll end up in a public collection — in a collection that makes sense.”